“Until we can
show Hollywood that stories by us, about us are a way of directly generating
money, we will not have the opportunities, or control over our own stories that
straight cis people have always enjoyed,” he
laments. “This movie doing poorly at the box office limits the
opportunities which will be in our future.”
While the
film’s star Billy Eichner mostly blamed straight people, Branum targeted, in part,
LGBTQ people looking for a more reflective film than the trailers seem to
portray – even
if the cast was almost all queer. This theory is incredibly common across
the community whenever something one of us does isn’t as successful as we’d
hoped.
We had too
little faith! We blew it. We didn’t support our own enough! Our straight bosses
will never give us a chance again.
First, let’s
put aside the deeply problematic way Universal Pictures marketed the film,
somewhat unfairly maligning what is seemingly an enjoyable, substantive work
Eichner, Branum, and everyone else can be proud of. The studio killed the
movie’s image at the outset, seemingly orienting the trailers and
advertisements to straight people who have never actually met a gay person but
who totally support marriage equality – in theory.
Ignoring that,
in general, are we even responsible for LGBTQ works not being as lucrative for
studios or popular across society as straight ones?
LGBTQ people
account for around
5-10 percent of the overall population. There will always be a problem with
estimating our true size, but the 21 percent Gen
Z claims is an outlier.
Even at five
or 10 percent, we matter. We have just as much of a claim on American pop
culture as other minority communities, and we appear across all groups,
too. Jewish
Americans are only about 2.4 percent of the nation’s population and
Black Americans are only about
14 percent.
Will we LGBTQ
folks alone ever have the economic or political might of mainstream society?
That sounds a little hopeful in a “detached from reality” sense. This idea also
kind of punches down.
For all our
bluster about the power of pink dollars, we’re also a community that, like the
mainstream, concentrates wealth amongst a few while most struggle. Unlike the
mainstream, we seem to have higher
incidence of high school dropouts, poverty, substance
use, and suicide than
straight peers.
This reality
runs headlong into the tiresome claim that if only we had supported something,
it would be doing better. Because we simply don’t have that power or those
resources.
It’s more than
just a raw numbers problem, though.
Stories “about
us by us” as Branum calls them will never be as interesting to straight society
as straight stories are. Competing with them isn’t realistic. But thank God for
that.
From the
terrible and fatalistic “Romeo and Juliet” to the dreadful consequences of
straight people having children as detailed in “Mommie Dearest,” straight
stories are unsettling and speak to a truly miserable, seemingly mentally
unstable population. Likewise, based on the work of straight comedians, I am to
surmise that marriage is an unfortunate, depressing institution where one
partner is held hostage by the other.
As John Waters once observed even
decades before Herschel Walker ran for U.S. senate or Alabama’s Roy
Moore was banned from the mall for trying to pick up
adolescent girls, “The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life.”
Boring, I’m
not so sure. A trainwreck is hardly boring, even if tragic.
Contrast this
with queer relationships, improvised family structures, and friendships
inherent in the LGBTQ experience often formed as a direct result of the
toxicity of heterosexual culture. Surely our relative health in these ways
makes our stories less identifiable amongst straight society.
And that’s OK.
Communities
like ours, be they racial or religious or gender-based or otherwise, float as
life rafts in a morally impaired majoritarian sea.
Stories by us
about us, then, wouldn’t resonate with “most” people.
Sure, we might
be tokens some of the straights can trade in. Absolutely, we might have some
true allies who do share the same level of interest in our stories as they do
their own. And of course some themes amongst our stories are universal.
Still, acting
like it’s our failure, that we’re bad gays for the failure of a film or play or
anything else to rise to the same level of interest as Love, Actually is
the LGBTQ community equivalent of an abusive pastor saying people are poor
because they didn’t have enough faith.
There is a
reason why we have our own newspapers, verticals within magazines, content
channels, pride month, and parades. In 2022, it’s still about safety for many
but it’s also about the fact that we’re at our most powerful when we focus
ourselves together in opposition to the norm. That is literally the definition
of queer. Our issues are not mainstream society’s issues all the time. Our
thoughts are not their thoughts.
To me it’s
welcome self-segregation, not problematic ghettoization. Many of us recognize
the inherent peril in mainstreaming ourselves too much. Let us not erase
ourselves into box office success and hostage situation marriages.
If you ask me,
it’s unlikely that we’ll ever have an overtly LGBTQ movie be as popular as a
straight rom-com. Even movies that come close are done for the straight gaze
and typically enjoy cult classic status more than immediate box office success,
like The Birdcage.
I’d happily
retain our “non-traditional” community, even if it means a smaller market share
and films more suited for streaming, off-beat venues, and arts festivals. Let
us have different metrics of success for ourselves than a blockbuster lining
the pockets of clueless straight executives at Universal Pictures who think
we’re all Jack from Will & Grace.
Besides, given
the condition of straight society, I’d much rather be an outsider.
SOURCE: LGBTQ NATION
No comments:
Post a Comment